Chris Crutcher - 1946
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Advanced English 3
Emmett High School, Emmett, Idaho.
I. Personal and Professional Biography
Teenager Chris Crutcher felt pure shame. The girl he had played it on had just found out his prank. When only a freshman at Cascade High School, Chris Crutcher and a group of friends elected an unattractive and unpopular girl as the representative for the high school Carnival Queen. His classroom advisor didn't know who did it, but he made one member of Crutcher's group take her to the dance and the rest of them to dance with her regularly. Crutcher recalls that when dancing with her, she said, "'I know this was a joke,' and she hesitated, 'but this has been the best night of my life'" (e-mail 4/13). He felt pure shame. Later, this story became the premise for the short story "Angus Bethune."
Another instance of Crutcher's lack of empathy for others was shown when an outsider from the Emmett-area came to town. He smoked and had a James Dean style haircut. Chris Crutcher and his jock friends, those at the top of the social totem pole, encircled him and according to Crutcher, "scared hell out of him [...]" (e-mail 4/13). Crutcher remembers seeing him in shop class several months later and realizing what he and his group had done. He believes that he was the only one who apologized to this young man. Crutcher says now that "That memory is a small part of the premise of a lot of my stories about outsiders" (e-mail 4/13). Chris Crutcher's teen experiences growing up in Cascade, Idaho, and later working with teenagers in his adult years have sculpted him into the writer his readers know today. Crutcher, however, says it better himself. "I think we need to remember our youth because we are the sum of our experiences—actually, the sum of our perceptions of our experiences" (Davis 10).
Born on July 17, 1946, in Dayton, Ohio, Chris Crutcher joined the family consisting of his father, John William Crutcher, his mother, Jewell Morris Crutcher, and his brother almost three years his senior (Something 58; e-mail 4/13). Four years later, a younger sister joined the family (e-mail 4/13). According to Crutcher, his mom was a functional alcoholic, meaning, "She got the day to day things done before she started drinking at night [...]. That leaked out into my boy-girl relationships and you can see that in some of my stories, particularly Stotan! and Chinese Handcuffs." Crutcher names his mother and father as key influences (Something 60). His mother gave him a sense of passion and of being irrational. His father gave him the ability to make things simple... and get to what the problem was.
When asked when and why he moved to Cascade, he responded, "My mother grew up there, and her parents had been there most of their adult lives. Though I was born in Dayton, Ohio, that was because my father was in the Army Air Corps (now called the Air Force) and was stationed at Wright-Patterson there in Dayton. When he got out of the service, they went back to Cascade where he went into the wholesale and retail gasoline business with my mom's dad" (email 5/5). He does not remember how he felt because he was very little at the time of the move.
Throughout Chris Crutcher's life, sports played a major role. All during high school he participated in sports. Crutcher said himself that in Cascade, "[. . .] if you could breathe, you could play" (Something , 61). He competed in three sports: football, basketball, and track. Football was his best sport because "you didn't have to have as much coordination." During basketball, he kept the bench warm. As a trackster, he was somewhere in the middle. Crutcher' s athletic prowess emerged during college. At Eastern Washington State College (now Eastern Washington State University), Chris took up the sport of swimming. While on the EWSC swim, he was team captain and a letterman, and he reached the small college nationals.
Crutcher's enjoyment of sports is still evident today. He enjoys running distances up to half-marathons, playing basketball, and doing minimal weight training. He has a daily routine that consists of running four miles with his Siberian Husky and Alaskan Malamut through whatever terrain presents itself (Contemporary 18).
When asked if some of the characters in his books were autobiographical, Chris Crutcher responded, "Almost all of my characters are at least a little biographical. Louie Banks [of Running Loose ] is probably the one who is closest to the way I saw things. Bo Brewster [of Ironman] has my temper. The adolescent Crutcher and teenager Louie Banks agree that life is not always easily understood. Crutcher remarked that at the ages of seventeen and eighteen he felt underinformed and didn't have enough information to make good decisions" (e-mail 4/13). "The thing I hate about life, so far, is that nothing is ever clear," Louie Banks declares. "Every time you get things all figured out, somebody throws in another kink" (Something 63).
Crutcher and Louie took the same attitude towards grades. Crutcher's goal was to be a "perfect C student" (Something 60). Louie had about the same grades. Cascade, Crutcher's hometown, and Trout, Louie Bank's stomping grounds, were very small Idaho towns (Contemporary 18). Two of Crutcher's supporting characters in Running Loose, Norm and Brenda, were parallels to two important people in his life, his own parents, to whom he dedicated Running Loose his first book (Something 60). From his experiences as an EWSC athlete, Crutcher wrote Stotan !. He took Stotan Week from his own life as a collegiate swimmer; only he tamed it to put it in his book. Crutcher described his coach as "a madman, an absolute madman"(Something 64).
Crutcher describes himself as the typical teenager. "I was fairly popular because I was funny, and I seemed to be one of those people who was easy to talk to. I had a lot of friends; was angry a lot because the pretty girls thought of me as a friend, but weren't madly in love with me. I wasn't much of a student because I was very easily bored and didn't have much of an attention span. I worked at my dad's service station from the time I was nine, played high school sports like all the boys did simply because we needed the numbers. I wasn't a stand-out athlete in any way until I got to college and became a swimmer. If I were to look at myself from here, I would have seen myself as very straight-laced. I didn't drink or smoke, and believed a lot of the jock hype, though I did fight with teachers a lot when I thought something wasn't fair" (e-mail 4/13). He also describes himself as rebellious and charming ( Something 61). He says that he is not a well-read writer (Contemporary 18). At Eastern Washington College, he stood up against racism and caught some flack for it (Something 61).
By Chris Crutcher's senior year, he still hadn't declared a major, so the administration called him (Something 61). He decided to go into psychology and sociology because he had the most credits in them. He graduated in 1968 with a B.A. from Eastern Washington State College. After his senior year of college he went traveled the country with a friend for a year, going wherever the coin took them. Then, he was offered a job at Kennewick, Washington. Chris Crutcher, because of his career opportunities, has had many opportunities to interact with teenagers, especially those who have seen the darker side of life. He has been a high school social studies teacher, a school administrator, a therapist at a mental health facility, and a teacher at tough, inner-city schools (Something 59). At Kennewick he learned what students detested. He did a lot of experimental or, in his words, "free-school" educational techniques. His goal only was to convince kids, usually juniors and seniors, to stay with the program long enough to graduate (Something 62).
He taught at a normal high school, but did not enjoy teaching there because it was just too bland an experience compared to his previous one (Something 62). After one year he left to take a teaching position at an Oakland alternative school. The grades ran from Kindergarten to twelfth grade. The kids came from rough backgrounds and were rough themselves. Instead of going to school, the older children would drink and do drugs on the school grounds and throw balloons at the elementary age students. He couldn't take it anymore, so he went to the administrators. He then became the school administrator. This was a demanding job, but he did not take a cent more than when he was a teacher, even though putting in twelve to fourteen hour days were the norm for him. His policy was fairness and he disciplined accordingly (62).
Crutcher needed to get away from the rush of the big city so he moved to Spokane, Washington (Something 62). As a therapist at the Spokane Community Mental Health Center he dealt with family violence and young people. He learned how people get stuck and how they grow. He was also the head of Spokane's child protection team. Through all these experiences, he came up with the belief that "we are all connected" (Contemporary 18).
Through his writing, Chris Crutcher tackles tough topics such as rape and sexual abuse, discrimination, AIDS, abortion, pimps, prostitutes, and death (Something 59). He also discusses sickness, divorce, disability, motorcycles and youth gangs. His protagonists are usually young male high school students who are involved in such sports as baseball, basketball, football, swimming, wrestling, and track who are not typical jocks. His list of works includes Running Loose, (Greenwillow, 1983.); Stotan!, (Greenwillow, 1986.); The Crazy Horse Electric Game , (Greenwillow, 1987.); Chinese Handcuffs, (Greenwillow, 1989.); Athletic Shorts: Six Short Stories, (Greenwillow, 1991.); Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, (Greenwillow, 1993.); Ironman , (Greenwillow, 1995 .)
When asked what his life is like now, he replied, "I don't have a traditional family. My girlfriend's kids (who I have been with since they were eleven and seven) are in graduate school at Michigan and Washington. I still do some therapy, write, travel a lot in conjunction with the writing. I work out; run, swim and play basketball. I also volunteer as chairperson of the Spokane Child Protection Team, which makes recommendations on the toughest child abuse cases" (e-mail 5/5).
Chris Crutcher is a writer for teens who has written about what he knows best though his experiences as a teenager himself and working with teens in his many occupations.
II. Works Cited
"Crutcher, Chris." Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series. Vol. 84. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 17-19.
"Crutcher, Chris." Something About the Author. Ed. Alan Hedblad. Vol. 99. Detroit:Gale, 1999. 58-66.
---"Re: English Research Paper about.. .you!" E-mail to Becky Bjorkman. 13 April 2001.
---"Re: English Research Paper" E-mailed to Becky Bjorkman. 5 May 2001.
Davis,Terry. Presenting Chris Crutcher. TUSAS 693. New York: Twayne, 1997.
This essay was submitted by a student of Joanne Davis, an English teacher at Emmett High School in Idaho.